Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his support for this area of focus. We will publish the cost-of-education paper well in advance of the budget. I had hoped to publish it around the time of the summer recess, but I will certainly do so before the House resumes in the autumn. There will be plenty of opportunities for the Government, Opposition, students unions, media, citizens and everyone else to scrutinise what options the Government could choose in terms of grants, fees and student accommodation if it had X amount of money. Let us debate them. There will be a menu of options. We will not be able to choose all of them, but let us try to pursue some of them together. I will be meeting students unions again in July, having met them last April, and we held the stakeholder forum last week.

The Deputy is right to reference the cost of accommodation. It is the main cost that many students face if they have to move out of home to go to college. We have brought universities into the regions. Every region bar the north east now has a technological university, and work is under way on that in the north east. We are also using taxpayers' money for the first time to subsidise the building of college-owned accommodation. Any euro the State invests has to be reciprocated by a euro below market rents.

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